Putnam 2000; Sandel 1996; Smith 1997). It is uncertain that an electronically linked “network society” offers individuals social bonds and psychological anchors necessary for personal identity or loyal participation.
Both risks point to the importance of communities. As mediating insti- tutions, they can attach individuals to a larger network society. As means of organization, they can modify social inequities that limit personal development and participation in the network society.
Planners may play a role in developing these community capacities insofar as they can engage in “network-thinking.” In general, this entails conceptual- izing people and their current or potential relations in terms of social and political connections and purposes. In particular, it means recognizing and developing strategies for the social development of community.
This chapter presents a case study of community action with two purposes.
First, although the community organization does not directly participate in an electronically mediated network society, the story shows how efforts to develop community are embedded in extensive networks that constrain as well as facil- itate action. Second, the case offers an example of the “network-thinking” that planners must master to influence the shape of a network society, while illus- trating challenges in developing this thinking.
Following the case, the chapter suggests that most American planners would find network-thinking foreign, and would be unable to engage a network society, because of the liberal philosophical premises that have shaped Amer- ican planning and pervade American society. The second part of the chapter elaborates these assumptions.
The final section identifies directions for change.
Networks and Community Action: A Case Study
The Setting
Baltimore, Maryland, was once a magnet for European immigration and an industrial center. However, the growth of post-World War II suburbs and the gradual departure of manufacturing from the cities drew away many of the city’s most resourceful residents. Those who left not only had more money than those who remained, but they had more extensive networks – with employers, lending institutions, civic associations, and suburban residents. The number of jobs in Canton, the city’s industrial center, declined by 50 percent during the 1980s (Baum 1997a). The city’s population declined from a 1950 peak of 950,000 to just over 600,000 in 2003.
Canton is part of Southeast Baltimore, the setting for the case. Southeast was the place of first settlement for many immigrants and the city’s industrial center. But it has fallen with the city. In 1970, 94,000 people lived in South- east; the population dropped to 77,000 by 1990 and 68,000 in 2000. As more resourceful families left, communities’ economic conditions declined. In 1990, shortly before the events of the case, 16 of 26 Southeast census tracts had Howell S. Baum
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median household incomes below the city median of $24,045, and seven were under $20,000 (Baltimore City Department of Planning 1992). Unemployment, vacant houses, and vacant stores increased together.
The area changed racially as white families moved out. In 1970, Southeast was 88 percent white; in 1990, it was 72 percent white; in 2000, 55 percent of residents were white, 37 percent African-American, and the rest American Indian, Asian, or Hispanic (Baltimore City Department of Planning 1992;
Truelove 1977; United States Bureau of the Census 2001). Moreover, because relatively few white families had young children and because some of them went to Catholic schools, African-Americans in the area’s 11 public elementary schools, four middle schools, and one high school constituted 60 percent of 11,000 students in 1990 and 70 percent of 10,000 in 2000 (Baltimore City Public School System 2000; Southeast Education Task Force 1999).
In the early 1990s, activists conducted a community planning process to revitalize the area (Baum 1997a; Southeast Planning Council 1993). Recom- mendations on housing, economic development, services, and transportation gave attention to two types of organizing. One was internal – organizing residents, building up voluntary associations, and strengthening families. The other, more prominent, was external – connecting residents and organiza- tions to outside actors and institutions: business firms, foundations, legislators, nonprofit organizations, service programs, government agencies, and home- buyers. Although recommendations emphasized getting financial resources, the plan aimed to embed Southeast Baltimore in a network of organizational and informational support as well. The challenge was to give others incentives to join.
Activists saw this network as essential for renewal: unless the community could connect residents to something meaningful and valuable, few with choices would consider staying or moving in. Late in a planning process focused on physical and economic development, participants concluded that school improvement was central to their effort. They had hesitated to say anything about education because they knew little about it and because neighborhoods had no control over schools. But they recognized that good schools were crucial to hold- ing and attracting middle-class families with children. They saw the challenge as one of drawing the school system into a network with community institutions.
The case here involves the Southeast Education Task Force, a community organization established in 1995 to work with the school system to improve schools. Participants floundered for two years, struggling to identify their expert- ise, define a community role in education, and find people in the school system interested in working with them. They eventually decided to concentrate on building ties between parents and community groups and the schools, leaving curriculum and pedagogy to professional educators. The Task Force developed a community plan on education and a capital improvements plan for school facilities. It participated in a network that influenced the city’s Empowerment Zone education initiative. It successfully lobbied the school system to build a
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new school to relieve overcrowding, and, when state construction funding dried up, worked with the system to rezone schools (Baum 2004a).
This case focuses on an initiative to organize parents and another to bring health and social services to students at a school. Both projects aimed to build networks. Each succeeded in some ways but also encountered constraints in existing networks.
Organizing Parents
The Task Force wanted to organize parents so they could act knowledgeably on issues at their children’s schools. In the longer term, parent groups might connect across Southeast Baltimore. In this context, organizing had two aims.
One was to encourage and enable parents to organize to identify issues and act to address them, alone or, if possible, in cooperation with school staff. A second was to train parents for leadership: to teach them how to organize, conduct meetings, and negotiate. Seven organizers worked with parents at 11 schools.
Two successes could be described as textbook community organizing.
William Paca Elementary School was severely overcrowded. It had a capacity of 474 students and an enrollment of 920 in fall, 1997; the building was designed without walls separating classrooms. The school system proposed redrawing school zones to reduce overcrowding to “only” 161 percent after five years.
The principal wanted an addition built on the playground. The Task Force sent an organizer to the school. With the principal’s support, he recruited parents to the school’s parent–teacher organization. The group invited elected officials and school officials to meetings, where, at last, the school facilities officer agreed to build an addition.
General Wolfe Elementary School was a small, crowded school with many children of Latin American immigrants. The principal wanted to organize parents.
In fall, 1999, a Task Force organizer started working with the principal, the school’s parent liaison, and a Latino community organization. She got inter- preters for school meetings, translation of school notices, and an English class for parents. She worked with parents, community leaders, and school staff to lobby the school system to put a portable building on the playground. The school board concluded that the space was too small for a portable and decided to reduce overcrowding, instead, by requiring students who lived outside the school’s zone to leave and go to their proper neighborhood schools. Some parents were disgruntled, but most believed the school received a fair hearing.
There was more to the Paca story. The addition was built, and overcrowding was reduced. However, the organizer’s funding expired, and he left. Later, another organizer approached the principal about continuing the work, but the principal said she had no interest in organizing parents. She wanted to control the school.
This was one of several instances where principals, even if they had requested an organizer, resisted efforts to activate parents to do anything but help school staff. Fears that parents would present problems, create disorder, or just take time deterred school staff from connecting with parents or Howell S. Baum
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community groups. At the same time, parents had difficulties engaging in the activities necessary to create networks with schools. Work schedules and family affairs left many parents little time for organizing. Many lacked confidence to approach school staff – because they had themselves done poorly as students, because they were self-conscious about their language or appearance, because they doubted they knew much about issues, or because they were unsure about participating in meetings, speaking in public, or making decisions.
The second section helps consider lessons for network-building.
Developing a Full-service Community School
Some educators say they could teach more effectively if family and community conditions did not hinder students’ learning. Some parents do not raise their children well or get them to school ready for learning. Single parents are over- extended. Abuse, violence, and drugs harm children or worry them to distraction.
Low-income families have difficulty getting children health care. One response has been “full-service schools,” where health and social services and adult educa- tion are located in schools or made easily available to students and families (Dryfoos 1994).
The Task Force offered to assist Tench Tilghman Elementary School in becoming a full-service community school. The Task Force chair directed the Julie Community Center, a neighborhood family service center, and in this role contributed several programs to the school. She arranged for nursing students to work with families; they conducted home visits, offered training, and made referrals. She assigned someone to help parents with housing, utility, food, and clothing problems. The Task Force got funding for a program for parents to get the equivalent of a high school diploma. A grant paid for a staff member to do casework with troubled families. A program offered parents training in helping their children academically. The Task Force worked with a health care provider to develop groups for children of parents with drug problems. The provider gave the school a nurse and connected families to its medical center. The Task Force contributed a coordinator for these activities.
The aid had obvious benefits to the school. It offered resources that could ease teachers’ work. Some programs have shown short-term effects on attendance and student behavior (English 2003). The principal was extraordinary in being entrepreneurial and in recognizing the value of health and social service programs in education. With her support, the Task Force built a network including the school, the Julie Community Center, two universities, a health care provider, funders, school staff, parents, community members, and Task Force members.
The principal’s openness was a key to the network-building success. So, too, was the initiative of the Task Force chair in pursuing and providing resources.
Challenges of Community Network-building and Network-thinking
Both the full-service school and parent organizing produced results that benefited students. The community school could be considered a greater net- working success: it involved more actors and sustained a growing number of
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participants. However, the networks’ purposes differed: the community school aimed to deliver services, whereas organizing aimed to mobilize parents. Thus, while organizing sought to involve parents in networks as activists, the full- service school included them just as clients. Indeed, the fact that the latter network did not challenge school policies made it acceptable to the principal.
Moreover, many of the service providers participated only because they received funding.
In general, it is possible to create networks because there is vast empty space between individuals and organizations. However, no network is created in a total vacuum. People always have attachments, which make claims on time and loyalty, make it hard for some to muster the effort to build new networks, and lead others actively to resist new networks. School administrators’ indif- ference or hostility to parent activism, exemplifying these constraints, points up challenges in connecting community members to key social institutions.
The organizing case highlights obstacles to low-income adults’ involvement in education (and other) networks: limited skills, confidence, and time. These constraints can be seen as the result of the parents’ isolation from societal networks. They have low incomes because they have little or no connection to the labor market, limited access to public transportation, poor or no links to adult education or job training, little or no connection to child care, and limited access to health care. Marginal attachments to these networks may result from prior limited connection to good schooling, housing, employment, and public policy making.
These disjunctions affect teaching and learning. Children who have no informational, social, or economic links through parents or other adults to the world of success have difficulty seeing a path to success or believing school offers a way. When their perception discourages them from investing in formal education, they act in ways that persuade teachers not to invest in them, and teachers and students loosen ties to one another.
Thus poverty can be understood in terms of a paucity of connections between families and social institutions. Although the remedy is to construct linkages, representatives of institutions are tied into ongoing networks, and low- income families have few resources for moving beyond the connections that help them cope with daily exigencies. Thus existing networks contribute to community problems. The poor have little power to access these networks, much less build new ones.
These facts point to the limitations of the full-service community school project. Although it has linked numerous institutions in ways that probably benefit families, there is much that it is unlikely to do. Many of the institutions that affect parents and children, such as the labor market, housing market, and explicit or tacit transportation, medical, and racial policies, elude the grasp of community activists. Small-scale partnerships do not change the course of institutions.
Most proponents of community action recognize that projects must be both significant and feasible, so that neither residents nor funders become Howell S. Baum
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disillusioned or cynical after expecting communities to do what they cannot.
This case shows the delicacy of judgments about what is realistic for community action – in particular, what types of network-building should be the goal.
At the same time, the case points up challenges to network-thinking. On the one hand, Southeast activists recognized that residents’ problems resulted from their isolation – from others in the area and the outside world. They organized planning to assemble local thinking and strategize to build networks.
In education, they imagined a largely unprecedented organization – a grass- roots organization focused on building relations with schools, the school system administration, universities, businesses, nonprofit organizations, govern- ment officials, and funders to improve neighborhood schools. The Task Force established connections with these actors (see also Baum 2003).
On the other hand, Task Force members’ sense of urgency about education and their desire to do somethingfor children led them to seek “do-able” short- term projects. Their humble, sometimes discouraged sense that they did not know enough about education to plan a broad, long-range initiative reinforced this tendency. They found it hard to think about distant institutions and the extended and complicated connections necessary for a network that would include more powerful influences on the education of children they cared about.
They could not readily think about what they could not affect (or what, such as free-market biases in housing and employment or racial discrimination, was tacit or covert).
Planners, the Network Challenge, and Liberalism
What Would Planners Do?
The Southeast Education Task Force offers an (imperfect) example of network- thinking. Activists looked at residents and the historic community through a prism of social relations. They diagnosed problems and prescribed remedies in terms of where connections were lacking or necessary. After leaders of the planning process explicitly excluded education from the agenda, participants concluded that school improvement was essential to community development, because good schools provide unique links to families, homebuyers, employers, incomes, investments, and, generally, people and resources likely to create and continue a vital community. In this context, the Task Force saw organizing as intrinsic to planning and central to getting schools’ attention and involving them in projects.
How would American planners think about conditions like these, and what would they do about them? It is hard to answer this question outside a specific context without stereotyping planners or setting up straw men. However, although some would think and act as the activists here, probably many, even those in community development, would not. To begin with, substantively, many would take the position that schools are outside their expertise and, hence, their concern. Planning, after all, focuses on land use and the physical environment,
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with secondary attention to economic development. Education and “social”
issues are the domain of other professionals. This way of thinking forms a prism that admits only a partial view of what goes on in communities.
Procedurally, even in mainstream planning fields, few planners work with community members. Part of the explanation is that few have the training or skills for this work. Part is that few planning jobs require or allow much com- munity interaction. As a result, few planners are sufficiently involved with community groups to understand their perspective. Further, crucially, few are required to think about, identify, and try to work with the intricate networks that influence communities.
Most planners who do work with community members take a narrow view of their responsibilities that limits planning’s authority and effectiveness. They are likely to work with readily available individuals, rather than try to recruit others to get representation from many communities, organizations, and insti- tutions. When they do consider involving institutions, they focus on those nearby, even if others have greater influence on problems or solutions. Part of the explanation is planners’ training. Much reflects the limited expectations, or expected limits, of formal planning roles. Most planners think narrowly about the networks in which communities are implicated, and few take an active role to expand the networks involved in defining problems or developing solutions.
Because participants represent only a fragment of networks that matter, planning lacks legitimacy and the power to change much.
Few planners are required to think in network terms or engage and build networks in defining problems and developing solutions. Much of the explan- ation involves the history of the American planning profession. The result is not simply that few planners think or act in network terms but that the social- ization, training, and recruitment of planners produce practitioners who have difficulty doing so. A prime cause is American liberalism, the public philosophy that has shaped planning.
American City Planning
Network-thinking is basic social scientific inquiry: an effort to understand the linkages in social systems and political interests in influencing those systems (Healey 1997a). However, the roots of American city planning work against the inquiry and strategizing central to the challenge.
American planning took shape in late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century programs of urban reform. Concerns about diversity and disorder in rapidly growing cities produced engineering, architectural, social, aesthetic, and managerial initiatives (Krueckeberg 1983; Scott 1971). Groups of reformers, following the American pattern of professionalization, divided urban problems into discrete bundles and asserted expertise in specific areas (Freidson 1970, 1994; Hoch 1994; Larson 1977; Schön 1983). City planners claimed the phys- ical city, and zoning and comprehensive plans became their stock-in-trade. In leaving the “social” and “political” city to others such as social workers, public administrators, educators, and public health workers, planners gave far more attention to land use than to land users – the people and organizations whose Howell S. Baum
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